Britain has been joined by more countries in restricting travel to the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-sheikh after a Russian passenger plane came down on Saturday. France and Belgium have advised against all but essential visits while Dutch and German airlines have suspended flights. Airlines started repatriating thousands of British tourists on Friday under extraordinary security measures, as Robin Brant reports. After discussions between the British and Egyptian governments, special rules will mean passengers will be allowed hand baggage only as they fly home. In a clear sign of the severe concern about the level of security checks on the ground in Egypt, the British government has insisted that nothing goes in the whole of the aircraft. All cases and bigger bags will come home on separate flights. Downing Street says outbound flights remain suspended.
The British government believes the plane was probably brought down by a bomb. President Obama said this was a possibility which the US was taking very seriously. I don't think we know yet. Whatever you got a plane crash, first of all you got the tragedy, you got that making sure that there is an investigation on site. I think there is a possibility that there was a bomb on board.
The charity Medecins Sans Frontier says US airborne forces shot its staffs and patients as they fled in an attack on its hospital in Afghanistan a month ago. Gary O’Donoghue reports on the MSF review of the incident in Kunduz. MSF says it finds it hard to believe that the airstrike on its hospital was a mistake. Its report details the steps it took to inform both Afghan and US forces about the location of the facility, and what appears to be repeated phone calls during the attack to stop it. Work is continuing to identify some of the casualties. But it says ten patients died, two of them on the operating table. The US has promised to help rebuild the hospital and to make, what it calls, condolence payments to the families of those killed.
Germany's governing coalition of Conservatives and Social Democrats have resolved their dispute over how to speed up the asylum process for migrants.Here is Mike Sanders. It is a quarrel that has damned the Christian Democrats and their junior partner the Social Democrats for weeks. Party leaders led by Chancellor Angela Merkel held a joint news conference to announce an agreement to create up to five special centers. These would hold migrants with spurious asylum claims that include those born in countries deemed safe including Albania and Kosovo, those barred from reentering Germany and those refusing to cooperate. Cases could be heard in a week not month, and appeals would take only a further two weeks. Most could expect to be deported. World news from the BBC.
An official of the international watchdog on chemical weapons has confirmed that rebel groups in Syria have used mustard gas. The official from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons says its experts have determined that the gas was used during a battle between rival rebel factions in northern Syria in August.
A dam has burst in the town of Mariana in southeastern Brazil flooding a large area with mineral waste. Aerial pictures have shown rivers of mud and houses destroyed all buried up to their roof tops. A local workers union says at least 15 people may have been killed, and dozens of others are missing.
Newly released date from a NASA spacecraft has delivered new insight into how the sun stripped the atmosphere from Mars. The Maven Mars orbiter found that the solar wind traveling at more than 1.7 million km/hour carries off atmospheric gas at the rate of around 100 grams a second. Solar storms prevalent billions of years ago would have increased the rate of depletion by up to 20 times. The principal investigator on NASA's Maven project Bruce Jakosky said most of the planet atmosphere was already stripped away billions of years ago. Most of these stripping by solar wind at Mars were thought to have taken place very early in the history of the solar system when the sun was like more active when the solar wind was more intense, so today the rate of loss at Mars is low. The BBC science correspondent says that the depletion may have deprived nascent microbes of the time it needed to involve into more complex life forms.
A one year old British girl has become the first person in the world to receive a pioneering gene therapy treatment that has cleared her off cancer. Leila Richie was just three months old when she was diagnosed with aggressive leukemia when conventional therapies failed, doctors uses experimental gene editing science to create a designed immune system. BBC news.